HUM II Recruitment

Question: If I want to to target and recruit ELL students, where would the most sensible places be to work on targeted recruitment?

One question posed was what strategies could be employed to better target ELL recruitment efforts. This report reviewed the data from NYC’s Department of Education on enrollment statistics in 32 districts, focusing on those in Manhattan and The Bronx.

Limited English Proficiency Households

Below is the distribution of English Language Learner recruitment among districts and schools in New York, focusing on Manhattan and the Bronx. The second plot highlights those schools recruiting ELL students at the 95th percentile relative to all schools in New York.

One angle for targetting recruitment efforts is examining the distribution of “limited English proficiency” households in New York. The American Community Survey tabulates limited English proficiency households by census tract, which are defined as households that do not solely speak English, in which at least one member is reported by the respondent to speak English “not very well.”

The below interactive map shows the percentage of limited English proficiency households per census tract in NYC, with school district boundaries overlaid. Note that this calculation has taken out of consideration those tracts with extremely low (first percentile and below) total tract populations. While some of those tracts have high proportions of limited English proficiency households, the total number of people living in them is extremely small, and most of them represent land that is largely a park or cemetery.

Bus Shelters in High-LEP Census Tracts

The following 297 bus shelters are located in the tracts in Manhattan and the Bronx with the highest (80th percentile) proportions of limited english proficiency. Again, census tracts with extremely low population (often parks, cemeteries and other such areas) have been removed prior to calculation.

The entire table can be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet and will retain its formatting.  

Bus Routes Along High-LEP Areas

In addition to advertising on the bus stops located within the highest-proportion LEP census tracts in New York, placing advertisements for the school on the bus lines passing near the most LEP households is another strategy. Below are the top 10 routes in Manhattan and the Bronx, by the number of Low English Proficiency households they pass by (total LEP household counts of the census tracts they pass through):